Let's not forget Dropbox is just a replica of local storage. That's the whole model. It's more meaningful to discuss whether or not this could happen to S3. I don't see anyone legitimately worried about that, because it's quite obviously a very legitimate business with tens of thousands of legitimate customers (just like Dropbox). Articles like these portend to get you thinking about the broader implications of a takedown, but in truth they cloud clear thinking with what are essentially scare tactics.
It gets scary when the operators of the "replica" has the ability to delete files from your local storage as well. Amazon did this with Kindle & 1984, which caused a sizable controversy at the time. Next thing you know, somebody sends a DMCA notice to Dropbox, they delete your remote copy, and your local Dropbox folder is automatically updated to reflect the change. Whoa, no thanks.
Dropbox is also an apt comparison because part of the MegaUpload indictment has to do with their deduplication system. Dropbox is also very good at deduplication, which means that a single court order can cause all copies of an offending file to be remotely deleted from everyone's Dropbox folder.
If mozy was taken down do you think that it's possible they would wipe the drives of all users? I don't.
Amazon also quite clearly keeps hashes of all keys in S3, which Dropbox rides on. Would you expect the government to be able to issue hash based takedowns to amazon across all buckets?
This would be vastly more damaging in the context of Dropbox, not less.
I'm honestly curious -- what is the likelihood that you estimate your files being deleted from dropbox? It was always very clear to me that M.U. was shady, and I feel probably deserving of shutdown. Given a 5 year timelines, what is the probability that you guess dropbox suffers a similar fate (total annihilation, server seizure, etc.)?
Well, every Dropbox account has a `Public` folder with direct HTTP access.
Edit: Youtube, as a counter example, (I think) makes everything public by default, but they enforce the DMCA pretty heavily.
It has nothing to do with the Internet. In the context of file-systems, the word "remove" actually means to "unlink". Doesn't this technicality invalidate the indictment?
Likewise, the US DOJ makes a distinction between uploader-pays and downloader-pays business models, so we must also.
So if you wanted to start a website like this and maximise your business and legality - the simple answer is to just let people use it for piracy and pretend you dont know it is happening? This seems slightly silly to me..
a kneejerk reaction inspired by his fear of a legal precedent where a "physical file must be deleted where one of many users with ‘links’ engages in illegal activity"
